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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
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Literary Critic
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Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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More quotes by H. L. Mencken
No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.
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The worst government is the most moral.
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Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
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Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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